WRE: Mormon edition

Having broken through to destroy the Anglican Church, women now have the Mormons in their equalitarian crosshairs:

To highlight what they deem as gender inequality within the faith, women are expected to join a standby line for tickets to an all-male meeting of church priesthood holders, said Kate Kelly, the group's founder.

Church officials declined their previous request for tickets but announced recently that the session will be broadcast live for the first time. Church officials say the move aims to make the meeting accessible to all members around the globe.
The session is reserved for members of the priesthood, which includes most males in the church who are 12 and older. Session broadcasts were previously password-protected. Kelly called the move an important step forward but said women want to attend the meeting.

"We're hoping to demonstrate with our actions and our bodies that we are ready not only for the blessings, but the responsibility of the priesthood," said Kelly, an international human rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., and the founder of Ordain Women....

The movement began growing in the mid-2000s with the creation of the blog, "Feminist Mormon Housewives," said Matthew Bowman, assistant professor of religion at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and author of a book about Mormons.

That set off the creation of other blogs and websites, and more recently, Facebook groups. Ordain Women launched earlier this year and has a website with about 150 profiles of people who support its cause and a Facebook page with 1,000 followers.

"What you've seen is a digital creation of a community that has really become galvanized," Bowman said.

Kelly said she and others have heard from church leaders that motherhood is the equivalent if priesthood. Her group disagrees.

"Fatherhood is the appropriate parallel to motherhood," Kelly said. "Priesthood is separate and apart from gender."

Kelly said she is hopeful church leaders will be persuaded by the faith, persistence and respectful tone of the women and let them into the meeting.

One would think that the Mormons would have the brains to look at what has happened to every church that has permitted women to enter the priesthood before submitting to feminist demands and the long slow decline into irrelevance, but the initial indications are that the Mormons will soon go the way of the mainline Christian congregations.